Life Like Dolls

The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them

A. F. Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135944940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the 1980s there has been a growing billion dollar business producing porcelain collectible dolls. Avertised in Sunday newspapers and mailbox fliers, even Marie Osmond, an avid collector herself, is now promoting her own line of dolls on the Home Shopping Network and sales are soaring. With average price tags of $100 -- and $500 or more for a handcrafted or limited edition doll -- these dolls strike a chord in the hearts of middle-aged and older women, their core buyers, some of whom create "nurseries" devoted to collections that number in the hundreds.Each doll has its own name, identity and "adoption certificate, " like Shawna, "who has just learned to stack blocks all by herself, " and Bobby, whose "brown, handset eyes shine with mischief and little-boy plans." Exploring the nexus of emotions, consumption and commodification they represent, A. F. Robertson tracks the rise of the porcelain collectible market; interviews the women themselves; and visits their clubs, fairs and homes to understand what makes the dolls so irresistible.Lifelike but freakish; novelties that profess to be antiques; pricey kitsch: These dolls are the product of powerful emotions and big business. Life Like Dolls pursues why middle-class, educated women obsessively collect these dolls and what this phenomenon says about our culture.

Chapter One

Introduction

“This is not a toy.”

Most people looking at porcelain collector dolls (PCDs) for the first time find them odd. They don’t look at all like the sort of thing you would give to a child: they are too fragile, too elaborate. Unlike so many children’s dolls they are startlingly realistic, and yet their realism looks overdone, distorted. The fact that they are made to imitate real live children, and that their owners treat them as such, is somehow disturbing. Odder still, they are often collected in large numbers. The industry works on the assumption that buyers will not be content with just one but will accumulate dozens or even hundreds.

On the one hand we see a commodity manufactured in very large quantities by successful business corporations. Stevie,¹ also known as “Catch Me If You Can!” is advertised as a “Collectible Doll with Investment Potential”:

The doll you buy today may be a wise investment for the future. Once an edition is sold out, those who want a doll from the edition must pay whatever the market will bear, if and when one becomes available from dealers or at auction. That’s why fine collectible dolls often sell for more then their original prices within only a few years of being issued. Of course, not all dolls increase in value; values can go down…

On the other hand, we see an object that arouses very passionate feelings and which is treated by the collector as a real little person: “I’m transported when I see a doll,” says Anne R. “I go into another world.” Anne has an “extraordinary spiritual feeling” for her dolls. They are “magical,” she insists: “Dolls appear alive to me…. [I]t’s almost as if you can breathe life into them…. [T]hey can collect their life force, a warmth from you. You can almost see through their little eyes.”²

Why are some people so deeply enthralled by these dolls, and others so appalled? This was the basic question pursued by our student researchers, most of whom were women between 18 and 24 years of age and who were not in the market for these dolls. Their initial reactions ranged from a shrug of indifference to outright disgust:

“It’s obsessional. These women have a mental problem.”

“Dolls are creepy—they bother little girls.”

“They don’t look like dolls. They look older…like women.”

“Very weird…Freaky…Distorted…”

“It’s like taxidermy.”

“Makes me think of JonBenet Ramsey.”

“They’re promising something that’s already gone.”

“They’re, like, untouchable.”

“They try to capture life, but they are deathly.”

These responses were mild compared with what many women in their thirties and forties had to say. Academics especially were “shocked” or “nauseated,” and a few were critical of our motives in studying them. Of course, the censure and the disgust only increased our curiosity— the topic was plainly hot.

The collectors themselves are usually well aware of the oddity of their obsession: “Many blushed and others started laughing when asked about their compulsion to collect dolls.”³ They know it’s considered shameful for fully grown adults to be so interested in dolls. It hovers on the brink of madness—it is well known that clinically senile women often nurse dolls (Picture 1). To be interested in such elaborate dolls—lots of them—provokes a good deal of guilt. But there is strength in numbers: to see collectors emerging from domestic seclusion into the daylight of clubs, fairs, TV phone-ins, and Web chat rooms is very evocative of gay people “coming out” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Picture 1: Elderly woman nursing a doll.

The woman’s son died of pneumonia when he was a baby. She was taking stuffed animals from other residents in the clinic, so the staff got her the plastic child’s doll. She addresses it as “son.” Photo by Elizabeth Stanger.

Adults routinely disparage dolls. This is very evident in the dictionary definitions, which were almost certainly concocted by adult males. The word maybe originated in the Old Dutch dol, a whipping top, or in the Old English doil or dold, meaning stupid.⁴ We are told that “doll” is a diminutive of “Dorothy,” a name commonly given to dolls and puppets, and that it is also the “smallest pig in a litter.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “an image of a human being (commonly of a child or lady) used as a plaything; a girl’s toy-baby.” By transference it is also “a pretty, but unintelligent or empty person, esp. when dressed-up; a pretty, but silly or frivolous woman.” “A doll’s face” is one that is “conventionally pretty, but without life or expression.” Around the nineteenth century it was used to refer to “a common woman, a prostitute.”

Scholars have been particularly stand-offish about dolls. People who make a serious study of such apparently trivial things seem to fear the stigma of indulging in “Mickey Mouse academics.”⁵ Even more bizarre is the tendency for books about dolls to look like toys: Audrey Vincente Dean’s useful book Dolls, published in 1997, measures three and a half by five inches. Anything that looks like a toy seems to get this treatment—even when it is actually a human being: what can have possessed the publishers of Gaby Wood’s remarkable study of the dwarf Caroline Crachami to produce the book itself as a miniature?⁶ We are reminded that “mannequin” or “manikin,” the word we use for the people or dummies (or in the nineteenth century, the “dolls”) that model clothes, is a contemptuous allusion to a dwarf.

In this project we kept encountering the complaint that even developmental psychologists don’t pay much attention to dolls (indeed, to toys in general) although they are so much at the center of our early lives. Eva-Maria Simms points to a sexist undercurrent: “The doll, although featuring prominently in many female children’s lives, has found little attention from the academic community.” While “the doll barely exists in psychological theory,” the little attention that has been paid to the topic is decidedly androcentric, loosely concerned with oedipal struggles, little girls who (mis)treat their dolls “phallically,” and boys with an “unhealthy” fixation on girlish things.⁷ On the other hand, our worries about dolls are treated very extensively in modern art. Dolls have been used copiously by artists like Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman, and especially surrealists like May Wilson, to make statements of every conceivable sort, most of them erotically or morbidly disturbing. Jason Hunsiger’s picture Boy in the Bush “is a self portrait of the artist at age six playing with a doll in his secret hideout under the hedge. The doll, held by the boy, is dressed like the boy, in shirt, shorts, and sneakers, but appears as a menacing adult.” And in The Woman Without Children, a 1992 watercolor that is very evocative of the passion for PCDs, Ellen Phelan portrays a lone figure gazing longingly at a trio of dolls.⁸ The photographer Richard Avedon has made particularly bizarre use of battered, naked dolls in his sequence of fashion plates titled In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort.⁹

If we belittle girls and their dolls, we have also belittled the second childhood of old age. We have disparaged older women especially, a problem that the founding generation of feminist scholars have themselves become aware of as they, too, age.¹⁰ The increasing demographic weight of this segment of our population is forcing their special concerns on our attention. Women die later and more slowly of chronic ailments than men. Most of them live alone, at home; in the 65–69 age bracket, 34 percent of women are widowed, 7 percent of men.¹¹ One reason why they are less likely to live with their children than in the past is simply that they have fewer children.¹² Loneliness is the dominant affliction of later life, from which many women are seeking relief in the company of dolls. Far from trivial, doll play is a key to understanding the damaging processes of isolation and neglect that have developed relentlessly along with the poisoned chalice of increasing longevity.

Not all societies take such a dim view of adult relationships with dolls. They seem to have happier connotations in the romance languages: the French poupée (see our “puppet”) probably derived from the Latin pupa, a little girl, which in turn probably came from the Sanskrit root push, meaning to nourish. In other languages, what we call a “doll” would be translated simply as a “made-child.”¹³ In Japan there is a long tradition of dolls, which are integrated into the ceremonial life of women and their families. In the past, a girl got two hina when she was born, she took them with her when she was married, and they were passed down by women through the generations. On the third day of the third month there was a “feast of dolls” (hina matsuri) focused on girls, in which the dolls and their often very elaborate accessories were displayed. A motif of this feast was that the “living” dolls (the ones belonging to live girls) entertained the “dead” ones.¹⁴

How you see the porcelain collector dolls, and the values you attach to them, depends very much on who you are—crudely, your gender and your age. Interestingly, young children don’t like them, and prefer something that looks and feels quite different. Not many adult men are enthused by the PCDs, or are in any way sensitive to the purposes they serve, although there are reports of “serious” male Barbie collectors.¹⁵ There have been some very famous male doll designers down the years, including Johnny Greulle, the creator of Raggedy Ann, and Pierre François Jumeau, who in the nineteenth century made the porcelain dolls that are now prized as antiques. But we shall return often to the central role that women have played in the design, if not the manufacture, of almost every doll. This is as true of the large-scale production of PCDs today as it was in past centuries. Male designers have played their part in finding durable materials for play dolls, and ways of producing them in large numbers. But they also seem unable to resist the temptation to turn them into mechanical marvels. Casimir Bru, father of the famous Bébé Bru, experimented tirelessly with dolls that slept, ate, blew kisses, and chattered.¹⁶ Women and children get bored with such claptrap, preferring dolls they can animate with their own imaginations. More generally, male interest in dolls is assumed to be warped, signaling pedophilia or some unhealthy fetishism.

The different life-bound meanings of dolls are highly charged emotionally. Men’s problems with dolls hark back to their childhood, when at a certain stage they were made to feel guilty about showing any interest in them. “That boys are naturally fond of and should play with dolls as well as girls, there is abundant indication” declared Hall and Ellis in their classic study of dolls at the end of the nineteenth century. “The danger, too, of making boy milliners is of course obvious, but we are convinced that on the whole, more play with girl dolls by boys would tend to make them more sympathetic with girls as children if not more tender with their wives and with women later.”¹⁷ Kenneth Loyal Smith, curator of the Toy Collection at the New York City Museum, speaks for doll enthusiasts today: “Dressing them, talking to them, having a friend a child can really trust serves a great function in preparing us for adulthood, regardless of gender.”¹⁸ In spite of such liberal views, boys habitually react with venom against dolls. Our study is packed with tales of girls who suffered mightily from the destructive urges of their brothers, and who have sought restitution later in life by filling their homes with PCDs. The penance for these boy doll-destroyers is often a guilty terror of dolls later in life. Repeatedly, we found it was boys and men who most disliked and feared dolls, and who were intimidated by their glassy gaze or could not bear their frilly prettiness. These are themes that weave their way through countless folk tales, novels, and horror movies. A sense of guilt and shame may also dog the girl who is told at puberty that she must put away her dolls and grow up. Reckoning with this loss is part of the agony of adolescence, and in due course the ecstasy of collecting dolls later in life.

Our modern Western idea that it is sick or abnormal for grownups to have a passion for dolls has been carried over to criticism of other cultures and societies. Until quite recently, “primitive” (in a perverse sense, “childlike”) peoples were reckoned to have a weakness for dolls, or doll-like objects, to the extent that they actually worshiped them. This was “fetishism,” a naive tendency to imagine that objects are alive and behave like real people. Holding such objects in reverence was “idolatry,” and although there is no semantic relationship between “idol” and “doll,” it was felt that “some psychic connection cannot be doubted.”¹⁹ This made it easy to believe that children’s interest in dolls was a measure of their uncivilized, savage condition; and that the savages’ interest in dolls was in turn a measure of their childishness. An adult in civilized society who took an interest in dolls was truly anomalous: women who played with dolls were either mad or witches.

In our societies we have not scrupled about referring to the icons of other cultures—the kachina of the Hopi or the akuaba of West Africa—as “dolls.” If we shrink from the notion of referring to the crucifix as a doll, it is presumably because we cannot tolerate the suggestion that it is merely a plaything. The Christian church has always had a very equivocal view of dolls, sometimes banning them as idolatrous, otherwise incorporating them in images of the Christ child, or cherubim. Is the same sort of ambivalence at work in the aficionadas’ insistence that the PCDs are “serious” and should not be mistaken for toys? Jennifer, one of our researchers, remembered that her grandmother’s dolls were as untouchable as that other figure that dominated her house—a massive, eight-foot-tall crucifix. And yet religious icons come close to being toys in such forms as the Nativity scenes set up in households throughout the Christian world. In Catalonia, Spain, each of these must have its caganer, or “shitter,” the fun being to place this squatting figure, unmistakable in his red beret, somewhere obvious yet unexpected among the little plaster cattle, kings, and holy family. If we are prepared to admit sacred objects to the category of “dolls” we could surely trace the lineage of our PCDs in one direction to the putti, those exquisitely molded cherubs rising in clusters amid the baroque decor of churches throughout the Roman Catholic world.

Standard Western children’s dolls pop up in all sorts of strange and highly ritualized contexts around the world. Pink plastic dolls dangle from the headdresses of young male initiates of the Kabre people of northern Togo, West Africa.²⁰ In the children’s section of Japanese cemeteries, dolls have appeared in remarkable profusion, in the form of Mizuko-jizò memorializing miscarried, aborted, or still-born fetuses. William LaFleur describes the “Purple Cloud Temple” near Tokyo, given over exclusively to jizò. They apparently represent diminutive monks, but wear bibs and little sweaters, and often have toys. “Jizò is quite remarkable in that it is a stand-in for both the dead infant and the savior figure who supposedly takes care of it in its otherworld journey. The double-take effect—one moment a child and the next a Buddhist savior in monkish robes—is intentional.” Children are welcome at these cemeteries—there is even a playground. “The sense of kitsch arises because two things ar...